ellie mcd :)

painting: figures in spaces

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Artist Research

Here are some of Francis Bacons Studies of figures in grass. Sylvia left a comment under one of my posts that I should have a look at these, and I do find them quite compelling. I like the way he paints the field, and the shadowy almost evil looking figures.

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Milo on the grass :)

Took me maybe an hour or two? I wasn’t exactly counting

The colours looked a bit more vibrant out in the sun, in a way that my camera couldn’t quite capture

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Life drawing with Eoin. I decided to have a lil bit more fun with this one and use pretty colours.

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Life painting with Sylvia. It did not start out well, my whole underpainting was quite off proportion and everything wise. But i think I fixed it up a bit

Sylvia had me doing a small palette knife painting of the model. This was quite brief as I ran out of paint halfway through, but you can kind of see the form in the second painting.

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Painting of my friends Milo and Aisyah on the train. I chose a deep turquoisey grey to try and capture the aura of Irish rail.

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Little paintings made while outside yesterday, one with acrylic and one with watercolour

The watercolour is a bit dodgy, but that’s alright. I’ve since added a bit with a colouring pencil, which I think improved it.

I’ve been quite interested with shadows lately? And spent some time in Galway last Friday trying to capture the shadows of people as they walk. This was a lil hard to do with them walking so fast, which is why I spent a bit of time painting my own shadow instead.

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Okayyyy so this weekend I was thinking about grass. Mainly because my dad is doing some work on the back garden of which I do not understand. He is removing all the moss? But I swear to god if moss is supposed to be anywhere it should be in the dirt no? Anyways, he asked me to help rake up the moss and dirt last Saturday, but I didn’t want to, so I painted him instead

I’m not actually all that confident when it comes to painting people I’ve found out. I ran out of white here. It’s not perfect but it is definitely my father

Here is a painting of a man, cutting grass. I watching him go around the park across from LSAD for about 30 minutes last Monday. This is gouache, the former painting is acrylic. If I were to do it again I’d probably zoom in a bit on the fella, so that he is the focus of the painting rather than the scenery.

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sketches of my friendss done yesterday. Some better than others

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animals in fota :)

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Another self portrait….

Doing using Sylvia’s whole palette tonal technique

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Drawings done today of my friends. There’s a cheeky self portrait in there but please try not to look too closely at that. I mainly started drawing myself because I was at a loose end and saw other people working on self portraits. This version of me looks quite sinister. Very mugshot. I doubt I’ll do much more self portraits in future, it’s just a very confrontational process.

I have noticed that I tend to avoid drawings my friends eyes. I shall try to improve on this in future.

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My PowerPoint on Francis bacon, + info

Some sources / bibliography:

Hugh Lane Gallery holds an extraordinary collection of modern and contemporary art, brought to view in temporary and permanent exhibitions a

Homepage: | Francis Bacon

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/francis-bacon-682/who-is-francis-bacon

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Here are some drawings I’d done mostly over Easter. They’re all in my teeny weeny homemade sketchbook.

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Life drawing. Some of these are a little wonky. The ones I spent the less time on actually turned out the best in my opinion. I do have a slight tendency to overwork stuff, so I’ll try to be much quicker next time round. I used a variation of charcoal, pencil ( 4b or 7b) and Indian ink.

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Life painting. Not all too happy with how this turned out. It’s not the worst, but I really dislike how small he is on the page, combined with the fact I was using such a big brush to paint this fella. The details just didn’t shine through. It was quite hard to define anything. Next time around I’ll try to work bigger, and use a smaller brush every now and then, just for my own comfort.

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Painting! Took me about all day (Tuesday) to finish. There are still some imperfections that I choose to ignore, but I might just be crazy from having stared at it for so long. My favourite and the best part (I think) is the dark blue balloon on the left side. I think it turned out really well.

I also mixed my own black here! Which I don’t always have the patience to do.

I could probably work on the painting foreverrrr and ever but am choosing to stop now and try work on some other stuff. I think it’s fairly complete anyways.

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Started this painting Monday afternoon.